My Personal Email Account Has Been Taken Over By Junk

[ejchase]

Hello All,

I know I should know how to fix this, but I would love suggestions for a system. I'd say 90% of the mail I get there now is junk. I think I didn't use the spam button for a long time because it just seemed like it was moving stuff to another folder, but I realize now that would have blocked it.

I have some memory of a couple people I know setting up some system where they blocked all mail and then friends trying to get through had to send a message for them to accept, but I don't know how to set that up.

Anyway, I don't want to have to flee my email address. Anybody have any suggestions for managing this?

Thanks,
Elizabeth

[Tammy]

Gmail is great at filtering spam.

Older emails services not so much (hotmail, yahoo, etc)

[Alan]

Gmail is great at filtering spam.

Yes they are! My personal email address is on a private domain which I own and maintain and gives me the ability to provide personalized email addresses to family members. The first couple of years of use I ran my own email server in the home, long before Hillary, although dealing with spam was a constant headache trying to set up the appropriate filters and blacklists. About 10 years ago, I discovered I could route the mail through Gmail's servers and the problem went away. They know what they're doing.

[JaneV2.0]

I have an account managed by Yahoo, and I never get spam. It tends to shuttle all my political messages into the Spam folder, though. Comcast is spam-free for me, too. But when I had an AOL account, the spam was terrible, and I had to configure it to only accept pre-approved e-mail addresses. There were a few settings to choose from to address this, as I recall. Wish I could provide more help.

[Float On]

when I look at my yahoo email junk folder I'm amazed at how much junk is in there...on a daily basis. That's the email I use to sign up for things or reward cards, etc. My personal emails go through my outlook email and the junk folder there is completely empty. I really like outlook!

[SteveinMN]

Good suggestions here re: Gmail. What I would do once the spam is under control, however, is to set up a second email address (with Gmail or Yahoo or Zoho or whoever; there's a bunch of free ones). Use that address for anything but those nearest and dearest to you. You can always change mail sent to the "disposable" address to your "good" address. And this way you are less likely to have your good address spread for lack of sender security measures, "affiliate marketing", and things like that.

[BobM]

My machine recently started getting filled with spam and I tried almost everything including the use of Gmail and its filtering system. Outlook has a spam system that was useless. On a whim I downloaded a trial copy of Norton Security which includes spam filtering. Almost instantly it blocked 100% of the bothersome messages. Occasionally one or two messages sneak through and that is easy to fix using the delete key. I'm going to purchase license at end of trial. Be sure to check you ISP website. Many of them provide free anti-virus packages that may include spam filtering. Norton certainly does and works on PC and Mac.

[freshstart]

I use yahoo for my everything BUT friends and family, I cannot believe the amt that goes in the junk folder daily and how much spam comes through repeatedly from the same companies even though I hit the "this is spam" button. I have a gmail I never use because I've had this yahoo one for a decade, switching would be a pain but I am seriously considering it because all of the spam gets filtered out.

I use the email account provided by my internet company for friends and family and it rarely gets spammed and MacMail seems to identify anything that is spam before I even see it.

[simplelife4me]

go gmail.

[ApatheticNoMore]

seriously, I almost never get spam. And I don't use gmail, never have, see no reason to start now.

I suspect you mostly only get spam for things you have given out your email for. Now you could go through your existing spam and unsubscribe from them one by one (at the bottom of the emails there should be an unsubscribe link. Why? It's the law, that's why). Although this does sound a bit daunting, but if you wanted to keep your existing email address for some reason. Otherwise a new email address (doesn't have to be gmail - could be anyone) and don't give out your email except to those you want to have it. And yes I do have a junk email address for things like signing those political petitions and even ordering online much of the time. And so no my real email addresses (I have several) are basically spam free and if a spam sneaks through rarely, I unsubscribe.

[creaker]

I use Thunderbird for managing my email - I've set up folders (like Ads, Bills, Groupons, Linkedin, Stuff to do, etc.). Then I set up rules to direct messages to the appropriate folders. This cleaned up my Inbox.

But then I found a couple of other nice features. One is retention policies - for example, I know I am not ever going to read anything in Ads more than a few days old, if at all. So anything older than a week in that folder gets automatically deleted. So now I never have to clean up these folders, they clean themselves.

The other is in the rules I can set whether a message is deleted from the mail server when it's downloaded into Thunderbird. This cleans up the mail server as well so when I access it through my smart phone, all the "garbage" stuff has been downloaded to my computer at home and only the good stuff is left, so I'm not going through any spam on my phone.

I've probably spent in all about 2-3 hours getting it the way I like, and it requires a little maintenance from time to time, but it's better than sifting through and deleting junk mail manually.